The Daily Show: Ears Edition - Replay | The Early Internet & 9/11 Conspiracies | Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Jordan Klepper has heard a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories, including this shiny emerald: Osama bin Laden was a CIA operative named Tim Ossman. Together with Dr. Joan Donovan, research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Jordan unpacks how the early days of the internet and social media have shaped 9/11 conspiracy theories that are still appearing two decades later. They are joined by veteran and filmmaker Korey Rowe, who co-produced “Loose Change,” one of the first viral conspiracy theory films on 9/11. They discuss the legacy of the film, how the right has weaponized conspiracy theories for political gain, and what conversations we should be having about the role of the media. Originally aired in 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, we know you probably hit play to escape your business banking, not think about it. But what if we told you there was a way to skip over the pressures of banking? By matching with the TD Small Business Account Manager, you can get the proactive business banking advice and support your business needs. Ready to press play? Get up to $2,700 when you open select Small Business Banking products. Yep, that's $2,700 to turn up your business. Visit TD.com slash Small Business Match to learn more.

Conditions apply. You're listening to Comedy Central. Think back 20 years. Maybe you're in school or college. A friend comes up to you with a $20 bill. They say, check this out. And they start folding it in a kind of weird way. Kind of in half.

Then it comes to a point. Then you realize it's the shape of the Pentagon. And the image on the bill is now the twin towers with smoke coming out of them. What did the government know about 9-11 before it happened? If you ever experienced that or if you ever had that thought, then congrats Alex Jones. You're a 9-11 conspiracy theorist. This is Jordan Klepper Fingers the Conspiracy.

September 11th really was the ground zero of conspiracy theories. Chances are you can name one. Jet fuel can't melt steel beams. George Bush did it. What about Building 7? Osama bin Laden is a CIA operative named Tim. What's that you don't know about that one? Well, someone told it to me just a few months ago in a Trump rally.

People are talking, is bin Laden still alive? Tim, um... Are you doing math right now? No, I'm trying to remember his real name. Tim. Osama. Osama bin Laden. Yeah, Tim. Tim. Someone forgot his last name.

Tim is not the most saudi name. And he wasn't saudi. He was from the CIA. Needless to say, when we heard about Tim bin Laden, we were like, let's get to the bottom of this Huckleberry. And even though our unverified non-tipster couldn't remember Tim's real last name, we found it. His name is Tim Osmond. Totally fake guy, but his name is Tim Osmond. So I want to go through this conspiracy theory with a person who is a specialist in media manipulation and the effects of disinformation. Dr. Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard.

Joan, ready to hear this story of a man named Tim? Yeah, I know a few Tim, so I'm interested to find out if I knew him. You may know that this guy lives just down the street from you. And disclaimer, his name is not Tim. Here we go. Let me walk through this for you guys. So this nutter butter of a story starts in 1986 in Sherman Oaks, California. Classic, classic Bin Laden.

He's 28 at the time wearing dockers, and he's representing the interests of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. He's at a Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks to meet a couple of feds, and the name he's been assigned by the CIA is Tim Osmond. Now, at the Hilton, Osama bin, Tim Osmond, Laden is told by the guys from the U.S. government that the CIA doesn't consider their group truly representative of Afghans. And Tim gets pissed. He wants to lobby the D.C. Movers and Shakers for support. Now, the theory claims there is evidence that Tim tours U.S. military bases, other parts of the United States, including possibly the White House. He's even given special demonstrations of the latest equipment. Pretty high-end stuff. Now, how do we know all this? And by no, I mean, how do we make it all up? Because one of the Americans there to meet

Tim is a guy named Michael Reconchudo, a man linked to the Chinese industrial and military group Norinco, whose name is misspelled a dozen different times on the most official looking website explaining this conspiracy theory. He was apparently a loose end and he had to be taken

care of. So he gets arrested, accused by the U.S. government of being delusional, accusing him of modifying something called promise software in the desert, which obviously doesn't make sense because, and I'm quoting from the website here, sand isn't good for computers. I mean, that's a fact.

So, Rikun Shudo, which sounds like a delicious appetizer, is put in prison and accused of making all this stuff up. But if he were really making it up, then why is there evidence that the modifications to the computer software was made in an office in nearby Indio, California? Hmm? That's the story of Tim Osman, rest in power, fake king. strange way into what is probably the original internet conspiracy theory, 9-11. And that is why Joan is here. First of all, Joan, any reactions to the tale of Tim Osman? I mean, it sounds

legit. You buy it. Like, you know, clearly we've got a reputable news organization digging up facts and we've got, you know, layers of editors and others that have been activated, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars must have been spent on this investigation. So I'm on board. You buy it. And you're a pro here. Well, of course, of course. You know, what's interesting about things like this is essentially when you're being told

something that is illicit information, that you feel like you're getting information that nobody else has, it does make you listen closer. It makes you want to dig deeper. And when it comes to the early Internet, we, you know, we think a lot about, well, what are, you know, what isn't government telling us, right? And you have all of this new information that you have access to. And so the moment when the attacks on 9-11 happened, we all were concerned. But none of us really knew what the Internet was at that point.

You didn't even have major news organizations taking, you know, their websites very seriously. at that stage. And so if you were going online to find information about what happened during 9-11 and you were digging in, you would be drawn in by the novelty and the outrageousness of stories like this. And you may then find yourself moving between a network of websites and message boards discussing these theories and others. And so it's unsurprising. But also, we've had, you know, 20 years of this now. And it still looks a lot like that. Well, when we look at 9-11 conspiracy theories, where do we start? Where do you begin to hone in? I recently published a book with my co-authors called Mean Wars. And in the book, we wanted to explain how basically the internet affects

how people understand politics and communication. And so we decided to go back into looking at Occupy. And And what we were interested in Occupy was understanding the rise of Alex Jones. And as we were digging in, we couldn't ignore the fact that Alex Jones was also one of the major contributors to 9-11 conspiracy theories. But it wasn't the same then. It wasn't like he was online pushing this so much. He had a lot of television stations that were airing his show. And a few months, I think it was July 25th, before September 11th, he had a show where he was showing people the White House number and suggesting people call Congress and say, we know a

terrorist attack is about to happen. We know that bin Laden is going to be involved. They're going to blame it on him. And you, as a listener, have a role to play. And I won't want you to believe Alex Jones. I want you to go get these news. stories off my website. I want you to call these major newspapers. I want you to find out these statements were true by the White House about preparing for martial law. And I want you to let them know that if there is any terrorism, we know who to blame. And that participatory conspiracy being part of the action is something that Alex Jones has been able to really hone in on and bring people into these worlds as part of his media making.

And so you're saying some, and you're saying this is July of 2001 too. So there's people who are paying attention, they're hearing this before it happens and see this happening and draw a connection that gives validity to a lot of his theories. Does that build his base? It builds his base. But what it does is it actually, he actually loses his television, um, uh, Networks. People are, you know, this is kind of crazy. This is really out there. You know, it's very obviously xenophobic in some ways. Although cancel culture wasn't really a thing then, you could be openly xenophobic or Islamophobic. Oh, the good old days. The good old days before, yeah, before you, when you could get away with it, right? But by and large, when we were trying to study.

the rise of other kinds of political communication online, we did keep coming back to 9-11 conspiracies and especially memes like jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Why do we even remember that turn of phrase? Nine-11 is an inside job. You know, these turns of phrase can become very potent and popular and they're really sticky. And so they, those kinds of key phrases also became really important explainers or shorthand for groups of people that had started to come together on message boards and in email lists that eventually became to be called truthers. Now, I think what's interesting about this, you know, and on this podcast, we're looking

at a bunch of different conspiracy theories, and we often talk about how these things spread on social media and the Internet, looking at this as one of the birth of these types of conspiracy theories. It's also the birth of the internet at the time. Can you give us a little bit of background of how the internet is being used at this point and how people are using it to pass information, how people are getting information, understanding these theories? So this is before social media. So we're not in the era of social networks in the same way that we think about early Facebook or early Twitter. But we are finally starting to have high-speed internet in our our homes, which allows for the transmission of video. And this is a really important aspect of how we

understand the world around us, because it's no longer that you're getting your video from cable stations. It's no longer that strictly. And this opens up a whole new world of broadcast, creativity, innovation. And at that moment, there were a lot of people who were going online, making videos, making content that were anti-mainstream media. And I would say that in that time, even when I was using the internet then, I was someone who would consume these kinds of videos. I wanted to know more about what was going on in the world. I didn't always trust mainstream outlets. I certainly didn't trust the government. I mean, I'm a child of the rage against the machine generation, right? So we always want to question and ask more. And so,

but online, everything is done through hyperlinks at this point. So you're on a website. There's a page on the website with a bunch of links. And so you're really traveling through this very labyrinth-like information ecosystem where people are linking you to things or your following sets of links and you never really know where you're going to end up. But you always take it with a grain of salt. You think about it. There's no institutional power behind this message. You don't always know where you're getting the information from. So you approach it with a kind of radical skepticism at that stage. Back then, the internet was really a place for weirdos and geeks and people who wanted to understand more about the world and were sharing things for the love of one another. And I thought that was really, you know, it was actually kind of a nice time in a weird way because you could find your people.

I remember entering in with skepticism around that time as well and partially because of my lack of familiarity. with this new tool, right? It feels as everybody was skeptical in certain ways because we weren't experts on it. We didn't really know how this was working or what we were getting information on, but it was sort of like the Wild West in a very curious way.

And perhaps I'm speaking more to myself of somebody who was always afraid of taking big steps into the unknown. So I was always cautious about those things. I guess I'm curious about at that time, what kind of conversations or were there conversations about the Internet and how it should be,

regulated and used? So in 1996, there's this landmark legislation that is essentially a legislation of decontrol. It says section 230 essentially says that websites or computer services are able to moderate contents as they wish, but they're not going to be held responsible for the content on their services. So that means that if you're a server, you're an email host or your domain registrar if someone if some crazy person puts up stuff that's illegal it's not your fault right you're just providing this basic infrastructure and so that law gets passed and you start to see different web services blossom and you see groups of people still feel like they have mastery over the means of communication they are able to build their own servers they're able to register their don't

domains. And so essentially at that time online, regulators and many people using the internet were very optimistic that there weren't going to be these major crimes committed. Most legislation or people were concerned with child pornography. As we know, or maybe people don't know, but the internet's backbone and the innovation around the internet actually came about as the pornography industry came online. And so the way in which we may remember internet history, as a professor, I'm always telling my students, you know, like it was really, you know, it matured around pornography. And so it's not like that we endeavored to build an internet that was going to be the place for, you know, this free.

an open library of information where everybody's getting access to the world's knowledge. Like, you remember AOL, right? Follow the porn. I mean, that's always been the history, right? Isn't that also the innovation towards home movies? Like, allowing people to watch it at home primarily came because people wanted to watch pornography at home. And so the technology follows the porn.

If we could only aim pornography at a working democracy, that's what I'm hoping for. Then we can technologically get to a good place. And yes, we're like, oh, thank God. We have a lovely democracy that responds to the needs of its people. How do we get here? Well, people wanted to watch democratic porn. Fine. Okay, it's weird.

It's a little strange. No kink shaming here. No kink shaming as long as my vote counts. But if you think about it then, as we describe the history of the Internet, we're not talking about then, like, you know, know, we want people to have access to legal, you know, law libraries, and we want people to have, you know, access to the greatest science. A lot of that stuff is still behind paywalls. And so at that time, the early internet, you know, maybe the Wild West doesn't really even describe it,

but it was a bit of a free-for-all and major innovations weren't, you know, necessarily tied to any particular like public interest or social good. And so conspiracy theories and conspiracy communities were not just a place where you could, you know, jump in and say things and contribute, but these were also communities where people thought that they were building some kind of knowledge, some kind of resistance to the establishment. Right. And so the Internet had, in its infancy, this relationship to liberation, this relationship to if we had the facts and we were able to communicate freely, we wouldn't need governments. Right. And so there is a kind of techno-libertarian ethic that undergirds the rise of these kinds of communities online.

I love it. I want to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll be joined by Corey Rowe, a filmmaker who created one of the first viral conspiracy films about 9-11. We'll be right back. Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things, comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner, Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a lot. little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See the roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. I'm Chris Hadfield. I'm an astronaut, an author, a citizen of

planet Earth. Join me for a six-part journey into the systems that power the world. Real conversations with real people who are shaping the future of energy. No politics, no empty talk, just solutions-focused conversations on the challenges we must overcome and the possibilities that lie ahead. This is On Energy. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Jordan Clapper Fingers The Conspiracy. This week we're talking about Osama bin Laden and is apparently rich history as a guy named Tim from California, who turned into a CIA operative, and we're also going to look at a few

theories about what happened in the wake of 9-11. I'm here with Joan Donovan, who you've been hearing from, but we also have Corey Row with us today. Corey's a filmmaker and a veteran. A few years after 9-11, he made a film that went crazy viral called Loose Change. It was one of the first conspiracy theory films on 9-11, and since then, a lot has happened, both for the aftermath of the film and for Corey himself. So we're going to talk about some of that. Corey, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me on. Let's talk a little bit about loose change. How did you get involved in making this film? I was a soldier in Afghanistan,

Iraq and my best friend, Dylan Avery, him and I were communicating from, you know, him in the United States and myself overseas and, you know, just talking back and forth and largely kind of came from a place of Dylan didn't really know what was going on with me and different things that nature and, you know, started to just kind of dig into things. Now, is it correct, it started out as a fictional narrative story and then morphed into becoming more of a documentary style film? Yes, that is correct. Dylan Avery, who is the director of the film. You know, he was always aspirational and he always wanted to make a movie. And he started to write a script in the post-9-11 era. And then in doing so and, you know, writing that script,

he was doing a lot of research about September 11th and, you know, on the internet, researching different things and coming across different information that the film started to split kind of from like a narrative. And then there was sections of documentary. And then he did his first screening. And the immediate response was like, this documentary is very interesting. You should drop all that narrative stuff because we had no ability to act or do anything of that nature and our cameras were terrible. And, you know, it was basically still like pre-DLR days. And we had no money or equipment to actually make a movie. But he did have the ability to kind of edit together, you know, small chunks of information on a laptop, which was really new technology at that time. The fact that

we were even able to get a camera at all and a laptop and be able to shoot content and edit that on, you know, on a PC, was revolutionary at that time. And it was really intriguing for us as young men and as myself coming out of the military. It was technology that I was interested in. And it was something that I enjoyed doing, you know, shooting footage. And I started to do it while I was in the military, making videos from my battalion and things of that nature. And then once I got out after my second tour, I joined Dylan in D.C. And he was already in the process of releasing loose change.

And I just kind of came on board to help him produce that. film and really get it out there as much as possible. And it just caught on to things that were really early on at that time. Google Video, which is kind of the predecessor to YouTube, was just coming online. And it was a way that we were able to share information. And we didn't even really do it a lot. We uploaded like a version of the movie in English. And then other people all around the world would download it and they would change it into their language, German, Korean, different things of that nature. And then re-upload it to Google Video. And during, I think it was 2005 and 2006, loose change held, you know, the first top video positions from one to 18 and all these

different languages. And it was just, again, was taking off in a way that nobody expected. And nobody really could have foreseen. It was just kind of the culmination of perfect circumstances between technology that was available to filmmakers early on, the growth of the internet, as you guys have been talking about as well as, you know, and this is really, I think the big thing is at that time, there was a huge response to the Bush administration. You know, you guys just talked a lot about why, you know, that these groups kind of came together and that 9-11 was the beginning of the digital conspiracy theory, which I agree with. It just kind of, it was all a response because the Bush administration wasn't investigating 9-11. At a certain point, the Jersey girls who

were victims of the 9-11 or family members of 9-11 victims were demanding investigation into 9-11. And the Bush administration, who was already entrenched in war in Afghanistan was like, no, we're not going to investigate this. We're focused on the war right now. And that's when there started to be this like huge uprising of people are like, why won't you investigate it? You know, what are you trying to hide? And then, you know, for people like myself who were overseas and fighting these wars, it was, you know, also, you know, disheartening. And then you have movies like Michael Morris, Fahrenheit 9-11 that were coming out. And so there was a lot of anti-war, anti-Bush administration feelings within the nation that really caused these things to

kind of culminate in different areas. And once they did investigate 9-11 and they came out with a 9-11 commission report, of course, there was a large uproar to that as well because it really was an sufficient investigation and didn't answer most of the questions that the family members were asking for in the first place, which is, I believe, why society and members of that society like myself reacted in the way that we did to create media that was to educate people about things that could potentially be going on so they got more invested with the Bush administration and what they were doing. Walk me through your headspace a little bit there, Corey. So we're talking, you're getting involved around 2004, 2005, is that correct? Yeah. How old are you at the

time? I was 22 coming out of the military. Twenty-two, and you're in Iraq. Yeah, actually, I turned 19 in Iraq. I turned 19 Afghanistan and then I turned 20 Iraq. Sorry, that was the exact years. You're in Afghanistan and then you're in Iraq. How are you feeling? Soldier in Iraq, how are you feeling? You know, early on, like everybody, I drank the Kool-Aid. There's even news articles out there of my hometown paper saying, you know, terrorism's got to be dealt with. But it was in Afghanistan that we were told that we were going to Iraq well before the general public was. And then I got to live that firsthand, you know, knowing that knowledge, coming back to the United States, seeing them drum up the war effort for Iraq with the false

intelligence that we all know is false intelligence now, that we directly lied to the American people and murdered innocent people in Iraq. Let's say what it was. Are you feeling this and doubting that as you are in Iraq? You know, I remember a very specific conversation in the emergency room of medical city in Baghdad with a father whose daughter's head was blown off. And he was like, this is what's going to happen. He goes, you guys came in here and we have let you do what you're doing. And he's like, it's going to get worse and it's going to keep getting worse and until you guys leave because we will never stop. And this is what's happening is you're killing innocent people like my daughter. And guess what? Exactly what he described to me on the first

wave of that invasion is what I saw, not only on my invasion, but every subsequent one after that as it just continuously got worse as one administration handed it to the next and things in that region of the world just turned into absolute garbage. So personally, for somebody who me, you know, who, you know, stepped forward and was fighting for the American government and then to learn that they're just basically lying to the American people so that them and their buddies have a blank check to rip off American taxpayers. And then it's like, all right, well, we should probably have a conversation about this as citizens of our country, right? Because this is fucked up. I'm sorry, I'm just going to say for what it is. Like, this was a terrible time in American history

where the government was just running amok. And citizens were genuinely upset and concerned. You know, and that's where we, you know, what I like to really focus on is the fact of where these kind of things came from. It's fascinating to hear. This is the story we don't get to know. Like, what you're walking into where you're coming from as you start to put together loose change. I guess so you have your experience in Iraq. It clearly affects your point of view and your opinion towards the American government. Clearly a lot of distrust and the information you're getting. And did you see the internet the way that Joan has kind of described it as a place to to find community as a place to find porn? Yeah, I guess first of all, do you first go and find

porn and then like, oh, I can also use this as a place to find community and or to put out information, seek out information? Is your take on the internet at that time similar? What my take is on the internet is kind of a cause and reaction that we always see throughout human society as we continue to evolve, right? Information was growing and things were happening and so these things started to go in one direction or the other. And it's really the largest question here is, can human nature, can humans survive mass communication, which is what we're really at the beginning of here and at the beginning of the internet was. And so for me to just kind of see all this different stuff was crazy. But for us, it was definitely a way to what I would call weaponize information.

We were able to use these new platforms to get stuff out there in a way that was never done before. So Dylan's a filmmaker. And even at the idea is let's create something narrative and successful in that sense. did things shift and you saw yourselves as as activists as opposed to filmmakers at some point? Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, we were given a pretty big hat to wear. It wasn't something that we asked for. We were young kids.

We'll be the best messengers for that. Of course not. Dylan just made a great video that was, you know, very, that was caught by people, you know, people could receive it or they liked it or, you know, whatever about it was something was new. And like she said, you know, they felt like they were on the inside of information. And so it grew exponentially. And, you know, there was, you know, memes later on about, you know, college kids pickup lines was, have you seen Loose Change and that kind of thing. But it definitely morphed. Like, we're talking about two very different errors of time here. We're talking about the creation of Loose Change and the base of the Internet and then where we are today.

Right. We'll get into some of the content of Loose Change and also where we are today. Joan, I want to bring you in here. Loose Change becomes, some say, one of the first viral hits. Something like 100 million people watched it were. affected by it. What was it that made it go viral from your perspective, Joan? Did we have even a concept of virality at the time when this was launched in 2006? No. Well, the things that used to go viral online at that time were, you know, still what goes viral these days, which is pictures of animals, cats, you know, funny memes. And you have to remember that, like, video is new at that stage, right? And so, but what really was this groundswell of interest was small groups sharing this link, getting involved in discussions about this

film and this documentary. And the community around it that we're also digging out different pieces of information and putting this really big puzzle together on message boards where people were communicating with one another and trying to add to the story, right? And in that way, the early Internet is highly participatory. And I think that one of the things you don't get with the kind of conspiracy that we would think of with JFK is the narratives come to. down, but there's not a lot of ways in which you can interact with the narrative. You can believe it or not. But with 9-11 conspiracyism, you had this ongoing daily dialogue that you could

participate in and that you could add to. And so that community building and even this idea that you were a truth seeker, rather than someone that was merely just, you know, consuming what the mainstream media was telling you and you were like this drone that was just living your life, right? You weren't going to look away. You were going to look further and further and deeper and deeper into this. And people were meeting each other. They were having, you know, conventions. They were making memes together and sharing them. And so it was a highly participatory moment for the culture. And because you thought that you were finding things that government and other groups were keeping from you, that really made you want to dig in more and understand more.

And the military component, I think, is really important here, because when people feel like they're being lied to and the democracy is at stake, they're willing to do things that they otherwise wouldn't have been willing to do. And so at the same time, not just online, you have these media that's traveling, but you also have a fairly intense anti-war movement that is consuming this information and then bringing it into the streets and trying as best as they can to stop U.S. imperialism. Corey, I know you don't think of yourself as a conspiracy theorist and that you have your passionate views about right-wing conspiracists like Alex Jones. What's the cleanest way to separate, in your

view, what the difference is between you and someone like Alex Jones? Alex Jones is definitely someone who's turned this into a money-making operation. He's become very wealthy out of this, and he's gotten himself into very high political places. I mean, let's remember, and again, this is something I really need to harp on here because we've had a whole conversation about conspiracy theories. And we need to talk about when this really got out of control because for a long time, this 9-11 conspiracy stuff kind of really quieted down. My life had moved on. People weren't talking about this anymore. I wasn't getting nearly the messages that I still get to this day until the candidate of Donald Trump came around. And that candidate of Donald Trump utilized

Alex Jones's platform to promote himself and to align himself with this kind of base of people and then decided to use that in his, you know, presidential career with the assistance of Fox News to perpetuate these conspiracy theories on a level that's never been seen before. Again, you're talking, we're talking about two very different things here, two 20-year-old kids who made a, you know, college-level movie and put it out for free on the Internet, and then the President of the United States utilizing Fox News to weaponize conspiracy theories to ignite a base to try to overthrow the country. And then now we're in this kind of post-era.

And they use this, and they took this in which so ironic about it, the same group of people that hated us when we made this video because we were anti-war. We were leftists. We were liberals. We didn't want to, we were pacifists. I'm not into guns and that kind of shit. And so now to have the same people that hated us using this material to propagate their own nonsense is kind of very interesting to me. And furthermore on Alex Jones, like, you know, obviously we're talking about him. He just got hit with about a billion dollar fine after you tie in legal fees and all those different things as he as he should. And so let's really focus on what that is. That's the shooting and the fact that he's claiming that the people

are actors and all that nonsense, right? And so what's the difference between those two events between 9-11 and Sandy Hook? 9-11 was a response by family members in an era when there was information that wasn't being disseminated to the American public. And it was not only conspiracy theorists who were interested in that information. The American media was perpetuating 9-11 for decades afterwards with every little bit of new information that was coming out. But back to, you know, Sandy Hook, that kind of conspiracy came up within a couple months and it was generated on the internet by people who were not directly related to the event, which is very different than the 9-11 situation where this took years to culminate. And so for us, we were coming from a place where we were trying

to do what we believed was honorable using the things that we had available to us at the time. And we believed in what we were doing and we were trying to make it the most scholarly piece of evidence that we could put out there. And we always, that's why we did so many revisions and that's why we kind of remove things and we admitted to our mistakes. And we consistently try to just have a conversation about it so that we could always get a new investigation. And that was always our aim. And the reason we wanted that new investigation was to support the family members who also wanted that new investigation into 9-11 and they never got it. What is your, what is your relationship with it now? Knowing where we're at, obviously, we're in a very different place than we

were. We're social media is very different now. And like, you're an older person. Information is come out, there's distrust across the board. And I know you guys have revised the film, but there's even a cottage industry that sprung up to debunk theories that you guys were putting out there as well. Like, how do you see that film currently? I mean, I'm the producer of that film and I will be for the rest of my life. So my job is to make sure that it doesn't disappear because it's such an important piece of information that we need to analyze and have a conversation about. And I also think it's... You still have the same questions about about 9-11 that you had in that film?

Do you have those today? There's definitely, you know, there's a lot, that film was put out 20 years ago, right? And during that time, so much more information has come out from the United States government with redacted documents and different things of that nature. But there's still some major questions for me that need to be answered.

This brings up a lot of interesting questions and it's a delicate conversation. I think, Corey, I can see, I think you bring up something that I think a lot of people, on the left, on the right are grappling with right now. We should be skeptical of our government

and the institutions around us. And I think we're looking for what that line is of what is healthy skepticism and what is skepticism that is degrading faith in institutions. I think there are critics of something like loose change and some of these, the truth are movement.

There are critics that live within victims' families who feel like this takes the responsibility off of the people who perhaps perpetuated the horror of 9-11, and it adds disinformation out there, that it erodes faith in institutions. But I'm sure we should be more skeptical of the institutions and the information that we have. I think there's an argument, too, if some people would argue that what you're putting out there is misinformation, it's also in response to a government that is putting out misinformation. You're fighting a war in Iraq that is based on misinformation, which puts us in this fucking place right now

where it doesn't feel like we're getting healthy good information. Joan, I think I look to you when it comes to theories, where is the healthy line? How do we show distrust in positions of power without eroding distrust or eroding trust in sort of our society? Well, what's interesting about government or the state is I don't think there's anybody that's ever been really satisfied with the state. I don't think that there's a utopia anywhere where people are like, you know who's doing a good job are government, right? Like, it's just not something you hear, right? Especially as we get into different issues. But back in the early aughts, people were using, you know, there was a familiar meme going around, Bush lied, people died. Right. And he had made these statements about

quote unquote, a massive stockpile of biological weapons. Others had argued that, you know, well, we don't know if there are nuclear weapons, but we're pretty sure, you know, and so there was a lot of hedging back then about what to do and how to do it. But when you say massive stockpile and people are doubting that, the governments tend to double down on that information. We've seen that meme repeated over and over Obama lied, people died, you know, Trump lied, people died. It keeps coming up, right? And I think that as we imagine the role of government in our lives and what governments should and could be responsible for, we're at another crossroads right now with the role of NATO in the Ukrainian and Russian war going on. And

is it the fact that NATO is fighting a proxy war with, you know, with Ukraine suffering all of the serious, serious casualties? And so I think that it's important for people to be skeptical of governments and very powerful people making these decisions when it comes to massive casualties. Now, that doesn't mean we should just throw our arms in the air and say everything is endlessly corrupt and there's nothing we can do. Because I do, at the end of the day, and I think maybe Corey agrees with me, I do believe in the power of people and the power of people to come together to formulate their own ideas, to dig in and look at what kind of evidence is out there.

And we do need to have more facts and public interest information circulate throughout our society. And the last point I'll make on this, which is to say, I think we need a lot more journalism. I think we need a lot more investigation. I think when it comes to who's going to hold these people accountable, it's going to be journalists who are going to be able to get the goods. I don't think we can rely on law enforcement and those other kinds of institutions to get to the bottom of corrupt governments. It just doesn't really. seem to be doing the job. Journalists have always played this role of digging in, finding, and piecing together

different bits of information and creating that narrative. And so in many ways, Corey and those that made loose change weren't necessarily your traditional style journalists, but they are they are the archetype of this early form of digital journalism where people were doing more than asking questions, but really trying to make media to mobilize audiences and to get people to think differently. And hopefully what it does is it instills in people a skeptical attitude about how do you critique and understand information? How do you piece it together? And then further than that, how do you hold accountable people in power that are telling massive lies. And I think that that's where the big question about studying disinformation

comes in right now is because we don't necessarily know who's going to hold the very, very rich and powerful to account for spreading lies at scale. I think the most recent example of that is trying to understand who is responsible for the January 6th. insurrection and and what does that mean to hold someone responsible for an event like that. Corey, when you look at the information on the internet, who should we trust to ask these questions and what information should we be trusting on the internet? I think we're in such a gray zone right now that we don't have an answer to that. And I think what we need to kind of come to terms with is the fact that we as a society

won't have an answer to that. But I think, and this is my idea, this is my solution. this is where the line is for me is that we need to educate our children better right from the start if you ask any kid in america right now what were columbus's three ships they'll tell you right and so we know how to teach our children good information we just need or we know how to teach our children information we just need to make that good information and so i think we need to kind of just accept the fact that where we are right now is kind of where we are and of course we need to tombstone engineer that is best we can but we need to do our research on how this misinformation is affecting us and how

it's driving us and the things like Joan is doing and trying to to grapple with and then figure out a way that we can instill that information into our children early on so that they grow up with the right tools to be able to discern good information from bad and I think that's a solution of course it's not perfect but it at least pushes in the right direction and it's very much what like Joan said there's no utopia humans aren't perfect and we never will be and so we need to just kind of keep working towards something better and leave it better than we found it and so in this instance, with this new digital age, we have created this new weapon of mass communication, and we need to figure out how it really adjusts to humans and how we can use it as a benefit

instead of what we've created, which is this kind of individualistic society where everybody thinks they're in the center of the universe, and figure it and retool it into something that's more beneficial for society. You know, like how is the societies of the 2100 is going to be using the internet? Can we envision that? Can we envision how they transmit information, good information, factual information, and try to reverse engineer that for our own society and start to implement those rules so that we can get to that place for the next generation. Because as I see it right now, our current generations, we just got to let us go. We're done. Like, we don't even have a chance. Oh, come on. Come on. We're okay. We'll be okay. I don't know. It's a very

optimistic point of view. I've been watching Jordan's pieces. And I like, what I see out there is like scary. So like, I'm not sure there's ever coming back from that, right? And we think Trump was so bad. Wait till the next one comes down. Because when I was in the Army, the one thing, I always had a new first sergeant, like every eight months. And I was hoping that the next first sergeant would be better than the last one. And he was never better. He was always worse. And it always with new rules and restrictions. And so, I mean, I hope, you know, I used to be optimistic, like 10 years ago, right? We all used to be optimistic. But then the last 10 years happened. And now we're a lot more pessimistic.

We'll put a bow on this. And we're going to talk about a couple of things. But kind of Final question for both of you within this segment here. What do you think the legacy of Loose Change is, Corey? I think Loose Change is the first viral video of the Internet. It's the only documentary that people are still talking about now all these years later. There's a lot of different stuff comes out. And I'm proud of that fact. Like I helped make a piece of media that was like truly just long,

he's going to live past me probably. And that's cool. And what I think it's turned into is the digital version of a band book. and we need to you know and then the statement goes any band book any band book is worth reading right and so again i think that loose change needs to exist on the internet so that we can have the conversations about it are humans going to continuously use pieces of information like loose change or anything else to you know push their own views of course they are that's human nature and it doesn't matter if it's loose change or zeitgeist or something they saw in fox news they're going to

use whatever they need to use to propagate their point of view but i like to look back at loose change as the culmination of an amazing series of events that nobody could have seen coming, and it really did rock the world. Like, it still goes on to this day. And what's super interesting about it is how it's morphed throughout these years. And to me, to see, you know, how it's been used incorrectly by other people, especially American presidents and Alex Jones and these different people, we need to latch on to that and not be afraid of it. We need to understand why it's happening and do the studies that she's talking about so that we can understand why these things happen. And then again, equip our children to be able to deal with them better. I was not trained for the society that I was

pushed into, right? In high school, I was like, oh, hey, we're going to do this. Nina Pint to Santa Riosk, it's Columbus Day. And then, you know, on my 18th birthday, essentially, I'm invading Afghanistan. And then on my 19th birthday, I'm invading, you know, Iraq. And I get to live firsthand at this early stage in my life, seeing the American, you know, foreign policy just as horrible as it really is. And I mean, imagine the psychological, like, just breakdown that I went through as a human being, to understand that everything that you were raised to believe in is an utter lie, like, and that it's just complete facade. And the thing that you think was you were believing in is long, long gone.

Joan, what do you see the legacy of Lose Change as? I think, you know, I think about it in a broader sense than it wasn't just the, the video and the evidence presented in it. But it's part of a moment where, you know, Corey, I appreciate you talking about how it was translated into many different languages. People felt that they could pick it up and take elements of it, translate elements of it, and make it their own. And it really shows us how this kind of participatory internet culture was going to develop, was that people were going to take information, they were going to remix it. In many ways, you know, no no shade, Corey, but we don't even

remember the authors of it, right? Like, it's anonymous in that sense. It becomes a piece of the culture. And, you know, clips of it, people I'm sure will remember, means that come out of it are definitely something that have lived on. But by and large, it was, you know, born of the internet and then created and became the infrastructure and the content on which many different kinds of communities base their worldviews. And I think that when you come into contact with those ideas very early on as you're making your identity and I'm, you know, I'm sure 18 other people in your life were either going off to college or starting new businesses or, you know, not going to war.

But it was, you know, it was a really unique time in American culture with the technological shifts that people were grappling with and the uncertainty. We don't, the thing that 9-11 itself introduces to the American psyche is that it can happen here, that the war can be brought home. And as a result, you get this paranoia in society about the other and about being attacked and you don't feel as if you have. protection and security from the government. And so finding one another and using information and building knowledge together becomes an incredibly powerful mode of solidarity. And I think that,

you know, as the internet has progressed and things have changed, those groups of people that found each other in those moments after 9-11 that were sharing these kinds of theories, continue to be in community with one another and continue to be critical of the state. And the last thing I'll add about this moment, especially around conspiracy, is sometimes communities have to use conspiracy as a way to protect themselves from governments

and government overreach. It's not uncommon for, if you take a situation like Flint where people were saying there's something wrong with the water. There's something going on. And people were really dismissive at the beginning of the Flint water crisis because people hadn't really learned how to do science and to build science around of the pollution in Flint. And so sometimes rumors and conspiracy can help communities come together and focus on a problem.

And sometimes it's true. And I think that elements of what came out of loose change or out of that moment that we would have called conspiracy end up challenging power and becoming an important way in which we resist tyranny and authoritarianism. Well, we need to take a quick break. But when we come back, I want to dive into how social media companies are dealing with disinformation in 2022 or, or if they even are at all. This episode is brought to you by Square. You're not just running a restaurant. You're building something big.

And Square's there for all of it. Giving your customers more ways to order, whether that's in-person with Square kiosk or online. Instant access to your sales, plus the funding you need to go even bigger. And real-time insights so you know what's working, what's not, and what's next. Because when you're doing big things,

Your tools should to. Visit square.ca to get started. Welcome back, everybody. Joan, if posting a conspiracy theory on YouTube is media manipulation, is the company that lets it remain posted participating in that manipulation? Well, it's a good question. Right now, legally, the answer is no. although there is an interesting case that's being picked up by the Supreme Court where there was some terrorism content that was posted on YouTube and the terrorists made money off of it because it was monetized and so now the Supreme Court is trying to figure out if YouTube was funding terrorism essentially and so that is a very unique thing though but by and large companies get get a big pass on their products being used to spread conspiracy. It's only been since about 2018 that companies have decided that they're going to enforce terms of service around lies and disinformation. I think in 2018 was the first time we saw Info Wars and Alex Jones

get de-platformed. He's probably one of the most famous people that have been moved off of these platforms. And that had a lot to do with public pressure by activists and advertisers to ensure that the information that was being provided on these platforms, even if it was entertainment, was not defamatory, libelous, hate harassment, or incitement. The question always becomes, you know, where is that line? And if you have to censor him for this, then you have to censor this person for this. And before long, no one can say anything. And I mean, I've dealt with this personally as well. Like, Luce, changed lived on YouTube for years. It's hundreds of millions of views. So many people have put it up.

I had it on my own channel just because I needed a place to park it for free so that people could see it, analyze, I have conversations about it, what have you. And of course, over the years, people have complained to YouTube about it and they would send me warnings about it and things of that nature. But one day, essentially, right after around 2018, I just one day got an email from YouTube and it was like, we've taken down news change for hate speech. You can't, you can't fight against this. This is just something we're going to do. And I know, of course, I write back, like, what exactly is the hate speech with a hate speech with a hate speech with in loose change because there's nothing in loose change that's trying to incite a riot. There's

nothing in it that's defamatory towards anybody. And it's just a piece of information after information that we're putting forward. And so YouTube has the ability as a content provider to not allow me to put my video on them. And that's their business. And that's that I understand. I think that's a great line for companies to have the ability to shut those things off. I think it was amazing that Twitter was able to turn off Donald Trump, right? And I hope he never comes back. But at the same time, these are all crazy people. They're going to keep talking. It's our responsibility not to listen to them. I'm driving through Amsterdam, New York the other day. There's a guy in the bus station just yelling at everybody that drives by. If I stop and listen to him and start broadcasting him

on national television, well, that's more on me and the people watching than the person who's yelling at the bus station. And so at my point, we need to be able to live our life. We need to be a free person in a world and not because we're Americans, but because we're humans. And you have the right to live your life. And as long as you don't hurt another person physically alter, you know, change their life in any way, then you should have the ability to live your life however you want. And then we're seeing that pushback between regulation, the state and people who want to live their life and do their own thing and, you know, self-identify as a cat. Well, we're in a tricky spot though right now, right? Like you keep talking about loose change

or all these things as pieces of information. And you're right. We should be able to have access information to have conversations around information. I'd love to live in a society that can have complicated, thoughtful conversations that can be extended and interesting. Sadly, it doesn't feel like we're in that society very often. But putting something controversial on an online space might not just be information anymore. I mean, it is an act that incites distrust. It's an act that could incite excitement and interest and curiosity for sure, but I don't know if it is neutral anymore. And so is it a cop out to say it's just information? Alex Jones can put that out there. It's just information. Like, this information has a reaction and causes a reaction. And people should

be held accountable when that information takes things to the next level. And again, why I was never invited on the Daily Show before Donald Trump, right? Even when Luce Change was at its heyday, like you guys wouldn't even talk about it and now 20 years later post Donald Trump were having these conversations not because a DVD was made 20 years ago but because a president used the national platform to propagate lies to the American people which caused them to try to overthrow the United States Capitol and every single person that was there should be held accountable and they should be put in jail and the president should be held accountable and we should learn from that as a country and as a society and that's the line right because if you go

over the line you start to hurt other people you take away their freedoms or you're you're impeding them from living their free life that's where the line is and and we were never there before we were never having those conversations it wasn't even part of it now post-donald trump because we have this now we live in a world where we have to deal with with all this craziness and it was there because corporations wanted to make money because politicians want to be a re-elected and exactly like you highlighted in your last piece how many people that are running for office right believe that the election was stolen, right? And it's a ridiculous amount of them. And that's not because of lose change. That's because of a president who used Fox News to propagate lives to

the American people. And this is a trend throughout current American history and new media where these or administrations are using media to lie to the American people to propagate for their own profit and personal growth. And then they just get to retire and go do whatever they want to do. And so, of course, people are starting to get pissed. And so yes, it is information. Yes, it does stir stuff up, but I wasn't into conspiracy theories before loose change. I'm not into conspiracy theories afterwards because I don't believe it's a conspiracy theory. I believe these are things that we actually need to talk about, that these are actually things that are happening in our country. And as Joan just supported me on, like, we know that the American government was lying

to us about the war in Iraq and no one's been held accountable. So where does that line go? Again, if people are hurt or people are killed and their freedoms are impeded in any way, then that has to be held accountable for. But people having conversations and discussing free information. We can't limit that. Otherwise, nobody gets to say anything. Yeah, I think, Corey, one of the things, and this is something that I think a lot about is the scale is different. So social media introduces a different relationship between free speech and audiences or listening, right? There's no obligation to listen. There's also no right to broadcast. There's no right in that sense of being of the right to reach 80 million people. We don't have, we actually

have laws against using broadcast to do inciting things. And so for me, you know, Alex Jones isn't necessarily just having conversations, but he's moving between that and mobilizing audiences. And And he was held accountable, right? He went too far. He crossed the line. And so now we have a consequence to that, which is exactly the way that system should work. And I wonder if that consequence is actually, you know, reflective of how out of scale with or out of touch with reality the Internet and social media companies have become. Like finding someone a billion dollars, it almost seems comical.

But when it comes to the scale of the Internet more is different. It's different when millions of people are different. doing a thing versus even a regional radio station. And we've never had broadcast rules attached to the internet in the same way that we have broadcast rules for television and radio. And so what I would love to see is us moving more towards accountability for people that have access to and are broadcasting to larger audiences. So maybe it's the case that if someone's, you know, talking to their, you know, 25

friends on a Discord server, maybe that's not something we need to bother with. But when somebody is reaching a million people and they have these calls to action and they are, especially in the case of profiting from political oppression, are profiting from lies and disinformation, that we should have some new regulations to ensure that they're not able to hurt people. And so I think ultimately, until we understand the scale question and how more is different, we're not going to be able to completely address, well, what does free speech mean in the context of the Internet, especially when I could just say your name and say you did this dastardly thing. And there's really no retraction. There's no way to get. Yeah, but it's gotten so much worse than that, right?

Like, we're way beyond that at this point, too, because now you can have a kid walk into, or I'm sorry, kid walk down the street with an air 15 shoot and kill people and you have half the country that supports that person and you have political candidates news stations who then fight for that person and what's even worse is again it's not just about groups on the internet now we have CNN and Fox that no matter what the question is it's going to be a debate from one side or the other and it is sickening no matter what side of the conversation you are right if you're a conservative and you're watching Fox News and you see CNN you're like oh my god this is just absolutely ridiculous but if you're a liberal and you're watching Fox you're like you're in the same

position. There's a really interesting book, one of my team members wrote called Networked Propaganda. And it's about these media ecosystems and how the media has developed over the last 20 years, but particularly looking at the 2016 election. And the right-wing media ecosystem is very different from left and center media. And what's interesting about the right-wing media ecosystem is how quickly they will collalesce around a story and a narrative. And if the facts don't fit, it's party over the news, right? You've got to get the party line. And, you know, this isn't in the book, but the controversy around Dominion voting machines and how if you said negative things about Dominion on television, Dominion is able to sue you. If you were saying negative things about Dominion on the internet, it's going to be decided by the courts. And I think that that moment where we start to realize, that these media companies are constricted in some ways by these different mediums and the regulatory systems around those mediums eventually are going to be tested in the courts. And, you know, when it comes to left and center media, they do not have the same kind of

infrastructure online. They don't have the same kind of motivated audiences in order to spread and distribute the news as the right does. The right has an incredible distribution muscle through Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. And so we're going to see over time how these different media ecosystems interact. And but I don't know, you know, like I'm a, you know, I'm a big Joker. I get it. Clinton News Network, MSDNC. I'm with you. I'm with you. And I don't know if cable news is really going to survive the internet era. But what we're dealing with is a difference of, well, do we want news or do we want partisan politics that looks like news? Right? And some of this is, I know I can tell Corey for you, it comes down to, well, who's getting paid out? And, you know,

I agree with you, we should follow the money, always follow the money. But also, I think the light for me or the optimism comes in where the internet is a huge international project. And we could reimagine some technology, some design, so that we have room for news. We have room for fact-based discussion. And right now, what we have is social media, which is essentially trying to monetize any bit of information that it can. And it's not designed specifically to spread public interest information. And I think that that's where we get into a lot of our problems, because we used to rely much more on traditional media to get information out there. And now the gates have shifted. And I wonder, you know, at the end of the day, are we going to be able to depend on

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and, you know, Kanye's buying parlor? We've got Trump with true social. Are we going to be able to trust social networks to get this public information out there? And if not, what do we build? Right. And how do we get there? And that's those for me are the big questions moving forward. Well, let's, you know, I want to ask one final question in that world because I know there's disagreements here, but it sounds like we want a similar thing, which is to have free-flowing information in conversations. The question is, where do those conversations live?

And what you just described, Joan, is a sloppy social media system doesn't know how to manage disinformation. It's now being run by Elon Musk is running Twitter who is throwing stuff willy-nilly at the wall. Where are we supposed to have these conversations? One, what can these platforms do? Or is there a platform where this type of healthy discourse can live? Or are we just screwed?

Corey, what do you think? Well, again, I mean, this stuff's always been around, right? It's just more visible now. KKK existed before the internet and they had their little meetings and they put on their costumes and they did all those different things. For me, this is an issue with information and the way that it's broadcasts throughout American society is that we just broadcast hypotheticals. Like we'll broadcast information about a case before we know all the facts and we have immediate like, you know, here's a car chase. We got to cover it. And so we've gotten away from kind of fact-based

journalism where we're just broadcasting whatever we can do to keep people's attention. What do you trust? Where do you go when you're looking for information? I don't trust anyone. I don't I don't I I've blocked every major news application because I just can't handle it's all nonsense like it doesn't matter what's on your phone what do you click you wake up and what do you click I read stuff about cameras I read stuff about New York state legalization I'm into different articles I let Google news feed give me stuff that's tailored to my interests and I block anything about Biden or Trump because I just can't handle it I think if you support a politician at this point it's basically the same as supporting a football team so it's just like they're just there so you can buy a jersey and so for me I'm I'm I'm I'm What was the question? I don't know. I feel I got lost again. That's what it was. Sorry.

So we're broadcasting hypotheticals, right? And her question is, how do we fix this? Right? So there's, I think the conversations can exist online. Because even if they don't exist online, like I was saying,

the KKK, they'll have their little meetings. And so, but it's up to the mainstream media to really grow a backbone here and start to, and again, it's part of the conversation that we need to go and how we evolutionize the mass communication. But the media,

we need to trust the media again. And that's, I think, one of the major problems in America and the world right now is that people don't trust the media. And that's because they're reporting on hypotheticals. They're going to report for a political base. And there's no true information that you can follow anymore where you would normally just clock into the 6 p.m. NBC news and get the world report. You can't do that anymore without hypocrisy. And that's again, what I said at the beginning, hypocrisy is more visible. People are upset because they know the government's been lying to us and is proven at this point over major things for at least two decades now.

it's in my life. And so like, you know, how do we hold people accountable? How do we adjust this? And again, like Jones said, let's focus on changing some regulations. Let's focus on, you know, putting information where it belongs. And like I said, let's focus on envisioning how the future societies communicate accurately. And let's try to reverse engineer that for our society and start to build those building blocks. But do you feel the same responsibility as somebody who put information out there as the mainstream networks do? I feel absolutely no responsibility over anything. No, I mean, I'm living my own life. I'm living my own life. If you want to do your thing, go do your thing. If you want to make, because again, everybody makes videos. And

what we're really talking about is a technological evolution where people are able to carry a camera and disseminate information online. And guess what? It's in everybody's hands right now. We have all of human knowledge in our pocket. We have a camera that can broadcast to everyone in the world at the same time. And what do we do with it as a society? And we're seeing it. We're not doing the right thing. We're not growing as a society. We're making things worse. So I don't know. But you have a clear distrust for the, the media ecosystem. system but you yourself are a part of that i mean 20 years ago i made a DVD i don't we don't have we post on facebook i'm not out there promoting loose change i don't talk about it unless somebody reaches out

to me to ask about it and i only do major news at this point because the littler guys just are normally tailored in one conspiratorial direction the other for the right to the left and so i like to have real conversations with with people like yourself so we can have a real conversation about this stuff and kind of push it in a direction so that people understand it i've seen too much lazy journalism where they're just like loose change is responsible for all the disinformation on the internet it's like that is the laziest thing you could do like you're not digging into the conversation at all you're not even looking at the information you're just trying to get clicks and that's where we are at with reporting right now we're just trying

to get clicks and you yourself know that you have to do crazy things you have to go to trump rallies and ask people insane questions that i would be terrified to ask them in person don't blow up my spot corey don't blow up my spot it's crazy you're a crazy person man but i love you and i really support everything you're doing too and i just want to say i love the Daily Show, and John Stewart was my fucking hero, and still as a veteran, to be standing up for my rights when no other political candidate is, like, I would vote for him if you ran. That's the only person I'm interested in. I tell you, I think he'd have some backers, for sure.

All the vets. Joe, if we can't trust the people running these platforms, how are we supposed to trust and use these platforms? Yeah, I think, you know, it's up to us to work together. I think journalists have a huge role to play. organizations have a huge role to play outside of news media and corporations. I think journalists still, like academics, have a passion for the truth, right? And I think that we are truth seekers.

And I think that that's an important thing to hold on to in a time when people feel like there's no anchor, that there's no truth out there that we can access. And in some ways, I think that that post-truth society really favors authoritarians. It really favors those who are willing to lie to us at scale and and oppress us because we then deactivate. We then step aside and walk away from the responsibilities that we have to one another. So when it comes to someone like Elon Musk, you know, he's not your typical homo-economicus rational actor. He didn't buy Twitter to make money, right? He spent $44 billion for a product that he probably could have built on his own for less than a billion dollars.

But what he was buying were the networks that were all part of. He was buying the networks of journalists. he was buying the networks of politicians. He essentially bought the chess board that global politics is being played on at this stage. There's really not a lot of ways in which anyone else could have that kind of influence rather than being the owner of a large platform. And I think that Musk's political aspirations in terms of being part of the global conversation about, about the war in Ukraine, what's going on in Taiwan, at the end of the day, are also being driven by his business decisions around selling cars and who the markets are that are going to buy

these cars. And he is going to be able to, you know, gain some kind of political favor with different governments if he uses Twitter in that way. And so I think that there's a very big risk to allowing our communication commons to be owned by single individuals that don't have the public interest at the core, especially when it comes to communication. You guys are old enough to remember long distance calling. You know, you want to call three towns over. It was going to cost you 25 cents a minute.

You know, we have a remarkable new innovation here where we can call across the world. I'm calling you from Ireland right now. I mean, we can call across the world for free and reach our family, reach our friends, reach our collaborators, colleagues. And that's something I don't want to lose in this moment where we're going to see this massive shakeup around what social media is. how much platforms cost, and eventually how these networks are going to change our society, especially our politics. And so I think the time has come if we are going to fix this for regulation around truth

and advertising, knowing your customers, political advertising online needs to have much more oversight. We do need to know exactly how much money these platform companies are making and where it's going, how much they're investing in content moderation. Can they actually enforce their terms of service? And as we move into understanding social media as an industry, I think we can start to fashion a public interest internet that will provide the kinds of information and forum that people need in order to participate in elections and to participate in our political systems. But right now, we're at a very, very early stage. And it's going to take a lot of work to build those institutions.

Follow the money. Follow the pornography. We'll get there. And follow me on Twitter. Oh, self-promotion. Don't follow me. Don't look for me. I don't want you. Don't look for me. I'm not here. I was going to say, Corey, I can't imagine you're big on the TikTok. No, I watched it for like a week and then I got tired. I got an Instagram follower with 16, or instant-up gram account with 16 followers.

I don't do anything anyway. I own a business. I make videos. That's my life. Well, Joan Donovan, Corey Rowe. Thank you guys for great conversation on healthy skepticism, trust, and blowing all that shit up. I love it. Listen to Jordan Klepper Figures the conspiracy from The Daily Show on Apple Podcasts, the Iheart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts. Watch the Daily Show weeknights at 11, 10 Central on Comedy Central, and stream full episodes anytime on Paramount Plus. Thank you.